Making teams ship more and fight less
Alexandros
Karatzaferis
Software Architect · 10+ years · Athens
Experience
- Designed and owned the core product architecture for five years — stable enough to absorb major product pivots without rewrites, and trusted enough that engineering decisions rarely needed defending.
- Reframed technical debt from a morale problem into a shared roadmap — the team stopped treating it as someone else's problem and started treating it as part of the work.
- Mentored a 7-person engineering team and represented the discipline at the C-suite — translating product uncertainty into technical direction, and technical trade-offs into business language.
- Kept the architecture simple enough that new engineers were shipping within their first week — KISS wasn't a wall poster, it was how we actually built.
- Brought AI coding agents into the workflow early — before it was fashionable — raising junior engineer productivity by ~25% and freeing the whole team to focus on harder problems.
- Established two-week sprints to build delivery habits, then let the team outgrow them — deploys moved to business rhythm rather than calendar pressure, which suited both the product and the team.
- Owned feature development end-to-end on a viral marketing platform — picked up an unfamiliar codebase fast and shipped reliably without handholding.
- Worked at real production scale: thousands of concurrent users, sharp spikes during campaign launches, and background jobs that couldn't slip under pressure.
- Full-stack engineer on a MongoDB–Node–Angular revenue management platform — learned the stack, found my footing quickly, and contributed without drama.
- Built a scientific crystal-structure visualization tool for researchers — a domain I knew nothing about before I started, which turned out to be the point.
About
Most engineers move toward either the code or the people. I've always done both, because I've seen what breaks when you separate them. Over 10 years across different team sizes and company stages, I've learned that the best systems aren't just well-architected — they're built by teams who trust each other and know what they're building toward.
I've spent the last five years as the architect who still reads the code, mentors the engineers, and sits in the room when the business makes decisions that affect the team. The thread isn't a stack or a domain — it's getting teams to a place where shipping feels natural and the work actually matters.
Featured Work
Going Deep
Before I use something, I try to understand what it actually is. I went deep on things like the JS event loop and Python's GIL. Now I'm doing the same with AI — learning the math and mechanics from the ground up, because I want to work on this technology, not just with it.
Toolbox
Education
Electronic & Computer Engineering
Technical University of Crete
B.Eng. · 2007 – 2015